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Leaders in Chatham County on Wednesday approved a moratorium that would ban the construction of data centers and cryptocurrency mining for a year in the county.
According to a presentation on the matter during the county’s commissioners meeting on Wednesday, the moratorium will apply to all development approvals for data centers, data processing facilities, cryptocurrency mining operations and “any uses associated with data processing facilities.”
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The county listed web services and hosting, as well as genome sequencing, as operations that would be affected by the moratorium.
The move, according to the county, would also give county leaders more time to study the impacts of data centers on the environment, and would give the county a look at regulations required to mitigte the negative impacts associated with data centers and cyrptocurrency mining.
A single hyperscale data center can draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity and use enormous volumes of water during peak summer heat. A 300-megawatt data center can use as much electricity as roughly 200,000 North Carolina homes running nonstop, based on U.S. Energy Information Administration household consumption data.
Residents around North Carolina have said they have concerns with large scale data centers being constructed. In New Hill, a rural community in Wake County, residents learning about a 200-acre digital campus approved to be built along Shearon Harris Road, not far from the Harris Nuclear Plant.
Project materials show the facility could use up to 1 million gallons
of reclaimed water per day during peak summer heat to cool servers.
Residents in the New Hill community of Wake County told WRAL News said they were shocked by the size and scope of a planned 200-acre digital campus on Shearon Harris Road. Concern like those in New Hill are playing out across the state, from rural counties west of Charlotte, now home to massive facilities operated by companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta, to smaller, faster “edge” data centers proposed near urban centers like Raleigh.
Artificial intelligence, according to researchers, is requiring datacenters to use far more electricity and generates siginificatly more heat, which intensifies both water and power demands.
The moratorium in Chatham County is expected to expire on Feb. 11, 2027.